


when you move

by choomchoom



Category: All New X-Men (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Cooking, F/F, Pining, Pride Parades, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-05-31 04:35:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19418608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: 10 years, two pride marches





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For the Xplain Discord June challenge - Pride! I wanted to post this before the end of June, next chapter coming when I have my computer and can fact-check some continuity stuff.

1.

Illyana is only here because Kitty insisted. “It’s a big party on the street! It’ll be fun,” she’d said, her hands clasped together tight in her lap, as if Illyana’s willingness to go with her mattered more than it should.

Illyana is only here because Kitty is hard to say no to.

It’s not unpleasant, though. The people around them are interesting to look at, in bright colors with brightly dyed hair and tattoos and piercings. Some of them are still carrying posters from the march, which range from blunt to clever to incomprehensible.

Kitty hasn’t stopped smiling since they arrived. She smiles wider when she sees a person whose style she likes, and smiles even wider when they see her looking and wave.

Eventually Illyana manipulates Kitty out of the crowd and over to the smaller crowd around a water fountain. They rest their backs against the hot, gritty brick wall of a building.

“Are you having fun?” Kitty asks.

There’s only one acceptable answer, what with how Kitty hasn’t stopped smiling. “Yes.”

“I saw one of these in Chicago last year, but I didn’t know about it in advance – I didn’t even know what was happening until after.” Kitty’s looking straight ahead, out at the crowd, instead of at Illyana. “I…I didn’t want to come just because rainbows are pretty. I – it’s kind of like the Xavier School, you know? A place where I can be surrounded by people like me.”

Now she looks at Illyana. She’s still smiling, but there’s something forced about it. Her hands are claspsed together in front of her again. “I thought you liked Doug,” Illyana says.

Kitty’s cheeks light up red. “Am I that obvious about it?” Then she shrugs. “I like boys and girls.”

“Okay.”

That seems to be the right thing to say, because Kitty’s smile grows and her hands unclench. “Do you like any boys?” she asks.

“No, I hate everyone.”

“Even me?” Kittys grinning, but there’s something pinched about it. Something that makes Yana swallow the nasty “of course” she would have said to everyone else.

Illyana still thinks of Cat sometimes when she looks at Kitty. Some days, all she wants is to leave New York and never have to see any reminders of her past.

But she hasn’t. She doesn’t. And she doesn’t hate Kitty.

“I can’t hate you, you’re my roommate.”

Kitty smiles instead of arguing against the flawed logic and takes her hand, dragging her towards someone selling stickers.

2.

Illyana remembers the parade, after. She remembers a lot of things from that era, and all of them feel like memories that belong to someone else. Like she’s watched a movie of what happened. Part of it is trauma, she’s sure, faking smiles and frowns and opinions, still trying to wrap her head around the fact that she’d become free from Belasco. The other part is the disjoint between those memories and the ones she’s forming now - in a very real way, she wasn’t quite there for all that, separate from it by time and magic and growth.

So, she can’t quite remember what she felt that day at the parade. Back then, Illyana hadn’t thought of herself as a person who  could  be gay or queer or anything in particular. It had been hard enough to think of herself as a person. 

But she remembers Kitty taking her hand, remembers that that was significant somehow. She remembers Kitty proffering Illyana her cheek and asking her to put a rainbow sticker on it, because there wasn’t a mirror and Kitty didn’t want to risk putting it on upside-down. She remembers Kitty’s smile.

3.

They hang out, sometimes, these days. It’s nice. Illyana’s got her team, theoretically, but it’s not the same as having a friend. 

Still, though, it’s not like it means anything. They’re friends. Despite everything Illyana is, they’ve always been friends. 

Of course his name is Peter.

Kitty’s talking to him  again  when Illyana reaches her door. She knocks anyway.

“Who is it?” Kitty calls.

“The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” says Illyana.

She hears the telltale click of the hologram generator shutting off. A moment later, Kitty opens the door, already in pajamas.

“Get dressed. We’re going out.”

“Where?”

Illyana has to hide a smile. She’d expected Kitty to start with ‘No.’ “New York. Pride parade today.”

Kitty looks at her curiously. “You want to go?”

Illyana freezes. She didn’t have an answer prepared for that. She’d seen it in the news and thought of Kitty. But Kitty hasn’t said no yet, and Illyana wants to keep it that way. “Sure.”

Kitty keeps looking at her, and Illyana can’t quite understand what she thinks she’s seeing. “I’ll need a few minutes,” she says, and beckons Illyana inside.

Illyana waits while Kitty slips on a tank top with three stripes, one narrow and purple between larger ones in pink and blue. Illyana’s never seen her wear it before. She adds a similarly-designed bracelet, runs gel through hair that’s starting to get its natural curl back, and hesitates over a basket of makeup before shrugging and turning to Illyana. “Ready. You look nice, by the way.”

Illyana is out of costume in technicality only – the top and bottom pieces are ones she tried out before settling on the costume she actually uses, and the boots are the same ones she fights in. She’d decided to go without the headpiece, though, and put her hair up for once, high on the back of her head. “You too,” she says instead of actually acknowledging the compliment.

Illyana ports them across the world, into the middle of the sparse crowd forming to watch the march. Kitty’s smiles are rarer, these days, tempered by the responsibility she bears and everything that’s befallen the mutant world. But she smiles now, as the first of the marchers walk past with banners and music. She smiles at a teenager who’s wearing a matching shirt, she smiles at a “Queer and Mutant and Proud!” poster someone’s waving from the march, and she smiles at Illyana when it’s over, soft and just for her as she ports them back to the school. 

4.

“I’m gay,” Illyana says, a few days later. She and Kitty are making dinner, which for Illyana mostly means chopping whatever Kitty puts in front of her while Kitty mixes spices and sautés. 

“Oh,” The scrape of the spatula stops for long enough that Illyana’s sure Kitty’s looking at her. “Is that new?”

“What do you mean, new?” 

“Did you figure it out recently or a long time ago?” Kitty rephrases. 

“Recently.” Something in Kitty’s tone makes her pause. “Did you figure it out a long time ago?” 

“I got the impression that you weren’t interested in guys,” Kitty says. Illyana’s stopped chopping, and Kitty turns the stove down and stops stirring. “I got that from the way you were at dances and the like in school, mostly. You’d find someone to dance with, but you never talked about them again. You always insisted that you didn’t get crushes. I wasn’t sure if it was just guys, or if you didn’t like anyone like that.” 

“I don’t,” Illyana insists. Kitty’s mouth twists in confusion. “Not anyone specific,” she clarifies, a flat-out lie. Kitty nods at that and turns back to the stove. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic has always been a spiritual sequel to snack mate, and the only reason it isn't a literal sequel is because snack mate is much lighter in tone. There's one brief reference to that fic in here, but you don't need to have read it to understand this.

5.

Kitty’s still learning how to look at Illyana without feeling a tug of misplaced grief.

She _died._ Sure, she was still there after, as the little girl Kitty loved just as much but differently, and the memory of her in her sword. Then she’d died again – who _does_ that? Who has the right to put the people who love them through that much pain?

It wasn’t her fault. Obviously it wasn’t her fault. But that’s only worth so much when from Kitty’s perspective, she was just gone.

Kitty understands that Illyana’s been reaching out. The pirozski, helping train the kids, that disaster of an almost-hug, the parade, the admission – it’s quite a list, especially for her.

Kitty knows she ought to reach out back. She _wants_ to. She wants movie nights in one of their beds and long conversations about nothing and teasing smiles and anything Illyana will give her, really.

She doesn’t tell Illyana any of this. She doesn’t tell Peter either. It feels wrong, somehow, to talk to him about how Kitty spent all that time back in the day puzzling out whether Illyana’s habit of resting her head on Kitty’s shoulder was an expression of something other than trust, or whether Illyana might like it if Kitty kissed her when they were giggling into each other’s faces, arms wrapped around each other after phasing through Illyana’s bed during a tickle fight. Kitty and Peter aren’t exclusive or anything – Kitty doesn’t even know if Peter would refer to them as _together_. But she’s new enough to navigating whatever relationship they have to not know whether it would be appropriate to talk to him about someone else she might want to kiss.

And who the hell else is there to talk to? Scott is Scott, Emma is Emma, and like hell is she using any of the kids as confidantes for her relationship drama. She wants Kurt. She wants Rachel. She wants the X-Men to never have come to this, where all she can do without compromising the kids’ safety is hide out in the middle of nowhere.

It’s all the same questions. Does she want Illyana, or does she like the attention? Does Illyana want her, or is Kitty reading her actions wrong? What Illyana wants is as elusive as the rest of what Illyana thinks and feels. It always has been. Kitty’s not fourteen anymore but sometimes it feels like she has just as little grasp of boys and girls and romance as she did then.

6.

When Kitty first sees the anomaly on the security footage, her heartbeat picks up. Possibilities for what they might have to fight, what the outcome might be assail her mind. But when she looks closer, she realizes it isn’t any of them. She laughs, even though she’s alone in the security monitoring room and even though it isn’t _funny_ , how much danger they’re in here.

She leaves the room, heading for the entrance to the compound. If it looks as nice in real life as it does on the monitor, maybe she’ll take a picture to send Peter.

She runs into Illyana near the outer door. “Want to come outside?” she asks Illyana. Illyana wouldn’t explain, if their roles were reversed, and Kitty would agree to go with her anyway.

“Okay,” says Illyana, even though she’s already wearing pajamas. Kitty pushes open the door and slips on a pair of someone else’s too-big boots to step out into the snow.

It’s bitterly cold out here, but the lights in the sky are even more beautiful than the security camera made them look. Illyana steps up next to her, arms just brushing.

“Wow,” Illyana says. She takes her eyes off the beautiful sight after a few seconds, though, and turns to poke Kitty in the arm.

Kitty jumps, but before she can get in an indignant _what was that for_ , Illyana tucks her arm into Kitty’s and lays her head on Kitty’s shoulder. Kitty breathes shallowly, as if that will be enough to make her stay.

Kitty knows it’s her move. She’s been waiting for Illyana to make the first move, this whole time, and Illyana has made several moves. Kitty knows Illyana; knows that she isn’t going to follow the rules.

Kitty twines their hands together. Illyana presses almost imperceptibly closer against her side.

7.

And time runs out.

Kitty knows that she’ll regret staying in space, and that she’d regret it more if she didn’t. It’s the kind of decision she’s been making since thirteen. It’s the next step forward.

Illyana at the pride parade, Illyana in the school’s kitchen, Illyana standing close to her as they watched the northern lights is all a glimmer, a blip in the lists of variables she’s coming up with. It’s something she’ll miss, she knows, but not enough to not go off with Peter.

She knows now that whatever happens next, they’ll circle back eventually. Illyana’s died twice, sort of, but more importantly, she came back. Maybe one day they’ll take whatever steps come next for them.

For now, Kitty leaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this didn't want to be a story with a neat forever-after ending, and i decided not to force it


End file.
